Wedding Crashers: Human Error OST 7
by Syberina5
Summary: Track 7 in a series of shorts inspired by music. "Balle balle je soniya de rang dekhlo/bina dor di udh di patang dekh lo." Look at the colors of these beauties/Look at these flying kites without a string. -Amritsar to LA, Balle Balle


Balle balle je soniya de rang dekhlo  
bina dor di udh di patang dekh lo

_Look at the colors of these beauties_

_Look at these flying kites without a string_

-Amritsar to LA, _Balle Balle_

_Wedding Crashers_

The reception sucked.

Not that she didn't love Cora and Ryan. Not that she wasn't thrilled they were married and paying the tab for this soirée.

Not that she was having a good time.

There were good friends, good booze, and interesting people—some of whom were nicely attractive.

But the band sucked.

The key element. Apparently no matter how great the food or the company, crappy music could kill any party.

At first it had been fun and funny. Popular rock music played with an uncharacteristic swinging style. The wedding party and many of the guests had been giggling and bopping like teens, and flailing about like it wasn't the end of the-beginning-of-the-end of their childhood.

Soon the dance floor was deserted save a few fogies unaware that the songs they were twirling to were really hard metal thoughts of drugs, masturbation, and pain.

The new Mrs. Freiland, in her creampuff gown, was circulating among her pale and wrinkly relatives—newly acquired and attained at birth—and unavailable for fun. Her new ball and chain trailed happily beside her, smiling and shaking hands. They looked like politicians.

Darla really wasn't a fan of politics.

Or old people.

Stepping up to the puce beribboned bar she ordered a rum and Coke and tucked some of her falling blonde tresses behind an ear and smoothed a hand down her lime cocktail dress. The dress was hideous. A bridesmaid's special which clashed with her tanned skin and the ruching around the middle made her look ten pounds heavier. It was a testament to her love for Cora and her enjoyment of Ryan that she hadn't found a way out of the wedding when she'd seen the dress, when she'd seen how the virulent color made her look like she was wearing a neon sign and knocked up.

She watched the bartender pour her drink and heard the next, even worse, song pump out of the speakers—a syrupy and slow version of some old club song. She groaned.

"Make it a double," she ordered the barman who wasn't even remotely cute or hot or a tempting cause for mild flirtation.

"Mine too," said a tall, svelte gentleman she'd meet once or twice before from behind her. A friend of Ryan's, a neighbor in their new townhouse community.

"The musical stylings of the incurably lame don't do it for you?" She asked, checking him out again from under discrete lashes as he stepped up beside her.

"Oh, I'm all for the musical stylings of the incurably lame. I own the CD collection, but this stuff?" He huffed and gave a smirked that brought out a few attractive lines around his eyes, and a dashing air to his lean face. "Makes Muzak sound like Japanese techno."

Darla chuckled. Her face spread into a smile, the fist one she'd meant in the last hour of misery. "And I've always so loved Japanese techno."

"It's the first thing I go for at Karaoke," He said his eyes sparking a bit though his face was straight, the little crinkles around his eyes smoothing out into tanned skin.

She took her drink in one hand from Bartender What-a-Waste and offered the other to Mr. Eye-Crinkles. "Darla, bridesmaid extraordinaire."

"Cavanaugh, savior neighbor." He ordered and turned back to her.

"Who are you saving tonight?"

"Myself if I'm lucky." She took a drink and watched his eyes drift to a table where a woman in a red dress sat with her arms crossed, her face set to grouchy, and her torturous but orgasm-worthy shoes tightly cinched around her feet. She was a woman who was _not _going to be dancing.

"From Max Feldman Trio?" She slid her eyes back to him, to the way his fingers ran through the sweat already coating his glass.

He gave a small, short huff of a laugh and half of his lips quirked up. "What I wouldn't give for a cigarette."

"Guh," she moaned. "I wish that did it for me," she said tossing her hair a bit, forgetting it was mostly pinned into her scalp. "I started smoking because it seemed to be such a stress reliever. Crock and a half."

"Yeah," he agreed, looking into his glass and the gin and tonic in it, tucking a hand in his pocket. "One of the many reasons I gave it up."

"But once you pop," she said.

"You can't stop," he continued, his eyes raising to meet hers a weak smile on his face. "You want to come cheat with me. There's got to be someone standing outside smoking. We can just," he shrugged, "second-hand smoke."

Darla listened with more than half an ear to the lyrics pumping into the room and felt a huge weight fall on the side of getting the fuck out even if standing in the fumes was going to make her hair stink all night. "What's the most used line in movies? Wanna get out of here?"

He smiled, cocking his head sideways at her. To the side exit.

Darla hedged towards the door out to the garden rather than into the rest of the hotel but she tried to go casually, stopping to talk here and there, waving at the groom across the room, making silly faces at the bride. Eventually she reached the French doors and Cavanaugh—who brilliantly took a different path—materialized next to her and they stepped through to the open doors and on to the gray flagstones.

The crowded flagstones. It seemed many of those not of a generation to appreciate the tunes coursing over the dance floor where trying to get as far from them as possible. But none of them were smoking. Cavanaugh caught her eye out of the corner of his and made for the edge of the small private area and towards the rest of the hotel's lawn leisurely.

Darla, not sure how much she needed a hit, lingered and caught the eye of a guest she'd been unfortunate enough to date in college accidentally. Yes, she really did need that lung clogging smoke. She double timed her steps until she was even with him, the dyed-to-match shoes sinking beyond the grass and into the dirt along the way. "Wait for me," she said wrapping a hand around his bicep to slow him so she could wrench her shoes into a more comfortable position.

She smiled up at him, a shaded, half smile, suddenly feeling awkward. Stupid ex-boyfriends always made her feel like an idiot. Rather than give in to the irrational need to apologize she cast her eyes about the covered portico of the front of the hotel.

It was dark, no stream of cars and bell boys filled it. Instead it was people lingering in the warm summer air, enjoying that it was still cooler than the heat of the ballrooms.

There were people from different weddings in different levels of formal wear. There was a tall, lanky man in a fairy pink cummerbund and bowtie demonstrating how he'd survived riding the mechanical bull at the stag-do because his bracelet got stuck in the harnessing and the crowd of beautifully cut and styled men around him roared. There was a bride wigging out in the far corner to a terrified looking pair of bridesmaids, her breath going so rapidly that at any moment the tiny covered buttons running down her back could start flying.

There were a few roly-poly old couples laughing and speaking in a way that probably recounted the better points of the dozens of weddings they'd been to in their lives. But Darla wasn't listening to their conversation, she was wrapped up in the vibrantly colored silks with elaborate beading folded about the women and draped around the men. Several young children danced up to be pinched and patted by the grandparently set and sent back away, flying off into the lobby with their glittering shoes flashing beneath them, their sparkling scarves waving behind them.

She followed, enraptured by the laughter in their eyes, in the air, in the colors, and found herself standing in a glowing hall full of gold fixtures and warm lights, a huge dais of flowers in the middle. It was an intricate and towering almost tree-like pillar of gold and pink, champagne and peach. The sight was new and bizarre but confusingly beautiful. In front of it were masses of men, women, and children their silks shaking and spinning, swaying and jumping to the exotic music and warbling voices.

The colors were everywhere. Outrageous blues and fuchsias. Astounding oranges and purples. Shocking greens and reds. Overwhelming teals, yellows. They danced around bodies, between curving and delicate hands in ways Darla had never seen. The magnificence of it stumped her, removed her from everything she knew and dreaded. Every notion she'd had for days, weeks, years, totally forgotten. In this new world she simply laughed at the mirage of a celebration in front of her and felt her body start to move to the drumming rhythm, unconsciously letting the movements of the silken wisps color her movements, bending her to the enveloping trance of their ritual.

There was a touch at her elbow. Looking over, glee still childishly etching across her face, she saw Cavanaugh staring off to the mob of writhing bodies. His hand danced down her arm and their fingers found each other. Together they moved into the edges and let their bodies weave them tighter into the music, the crowd, the moment.

Delirious on the spices and life around her, she saw one of the elderly on the edge of the crowd smile and clap at her and her partner and felt welcome, praised, smiled back and kept dancing.

It didn't occur to her that they were the only Westerners there, the only ones with skin that had to spend weeks in the sun before it was that shade, that their eyes were the only ones that were pale without contacts. Because in the music drunk crowd it didn't matter only feet, arms, hips, and smiles.

Everyone danced on, the man's dark, restricting suit the only black in the room, the woman's tailored dress the only garish color in a sea of jewels.


End file.
